It was the one evening in all my life when I seemed to be most virtuous and was least so. I thought it was more difficult than that to be a hypocrite and say things one doesn't believe. It must be very easy or else I must be strongly predisposed that way, to have succeeded so satisfactorily at the first trial.--Really I have some inspired moments. As for the lady, she made many remarks, very shrewdly worded, which, notwithstanding the innocent air with which she made them, denoted a very extensive experience; you can't conceive the subtlety of her distinctions. The woman would split a hair in three pieces lengthwise, and make fools of all the angelic and seraphic pundits that ever were. Indeed, from her way of talking, it was impossible to believe that she has the shadow of a body.--It is all immaterial, vaporous, ideal enough to break your arms; and if De C---- had not warned me beforehand of the creature's manœuvring, I should certainly have despaired of the success of my undertaking, and stood shamefacedly aside. How in the devil, when a woman tells you for two hours, with the most indifferent air you can imagine, that love lives only on privation and sacrifice and other fine things of that sort, can you decently hope to persuade her to get between two sheets with you some day to stir your blood and see if you are made alike? In short, we parted the best of friends, mutually congratulating each other on the elevation and purity of our sentiments. My conversation with the other was, as you will imagine, of a very different tenor. We laughed as much as we talked. We made fun, and very wittily too, of all the women there. When I say: "We made fun, and very wittily too," I am wrong; I ought to say: "She made fun;" a man never makes fun of a woman. I listened and approved, for it is impossible to draw with more telling strokes or to apply colors more brilliantly; it was the most interesting gallery of caricatures that I have ever seen. In spite of the exaggeration, you felt the truth underneath; De C---- was quite right; that woman's mission is to destroy the illusions of poets. There is an atmosphere of prose about her in which a poetic idea cannot live. She is charming, sparkling with wit, and yet when you are with her you think only of base, vulgar things; as I talked to her I felt a crowd of desires, incongruous and impracticable in that place; I felt like ordering wine and getting tipsy, taking her on my knee and kissing her neck--like lifting up her skirt to see if her garter was above or below the knee, like singing an obscene song at the top of my voice, smoking a pipe or smashing the windows: the devil knows what.--All the animal, all the brute rose in me; I would willingly have spat on Homer's Iliad and thrown myself on my knees before a ham.--I understand perfectly to-day the allegory of Circe changing the companions of Ulysses to swine. Circe was probably a wanton like my little woman in pink.